Presidency of Thomas Jefferson - Elections

Elections

Jefferson had been elected Vice President under John Adams in the 1796 election, though he grew increasingly hostile to Adams while working for him. Working closely with Aaron Burr of New York, Jefferson rallied his party, attacking the new taxes especially, and ran for the Presidency in the 1800 election. Before the passage of the Twelfth Amendment, a problem with the new union's electoral system arose. Hamilton convinced his party that Jefferson would be a lesser political evil than Burr and that such scandal within the electoral process would undermine the new constitution. On February 17, 1801, after thirty-six ballots, the House elected Jefferson President and Burr Vice President. Jefferson owed his election victory to the South's inflated number of Electors, which counted slaves as part of the population for representation under the three-fifths compromise. After his election in 1800, some called him the "Negro President", with critics such as the Mercury and New-England Palladium of Boston stating that Jefferson had the gall to celebrate his election as a victory for democracy when he won "the temple of Liberty on the shoulders of slaves."

In the 1804 election, Jefferson easily defeated Federalist Charles Pinckney by an electoral vote of 162-14 and was re-elected. With little strength outside of New England, the Federalists seemed to be fading away, but they became rejuvenated after his term during the War of 1812. Railing against the moderate Democratic-Republicanism of Jefferson, Congressmen John Randolph of Roanoke and John Taylor of Caroline broke with the president and called for a return to the "principles of '98," and a small weak national government. Known as the "Old Republicans" (or sometimes called Quids), the men targeted Madison and Gallatin as the primary sources of Democratic-Republican weakness. When Jefferson became embroiled in the Yazoo Land Fraud controversy, Randolph began to attack the president from the floor of the House. Randolph's actions had little effect other than to alienate the Quids from the rest of the Democratic-Republican Party. The Marshall Court finally resolved the Yazoo issue in the case of Fletcher v. Peck. While Marshall reluctantly agreed to support Jefferson's interpretation of the controversy, he was also able to increase the power of the Court by giving it the right to review the constitutionality of state laws.